Smoke Signal Advert - December 1978

From Byte - The Small Systems Journal

Smoke Signal Broadcasting: Hail to the Chieftain

There's not even anything on Wikipedia about Smoke System Broadcasting, so this is a bit of an obscure entry in the canon of computing. It ran a 2MHz Motorola 6800 CPU on a SS-50 bus - first developed by SWTPC in 1975 for their own 6800-based machines[1]. It also had 32K memory and was probably also the pinnacle of the "computer as furniture", as it claims a "stylish leather-grained cabinet". The entry-level Chieftain 1 retailed for £1,897 in the UK in 1979 (about £10,300 in 2019 prices), whereas the Chieftain 3 - as the model 1 but with twin double-sided 8" floppies - went for £2,846 - a snip at around £15,500[2]